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The introduction examines the ideology and politics of secular and Catholic intellectuals who created social and revolutionary movements in El Salvador between 1960 and 1980. These intellectuals drew on deeply rooted cultures of resistance in El Salvador and multiple international experiences to organize the revolutionary mobilizations that anticipated the civil war. The introduction includes a discussion of the influence of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, who for many remains the quintessential rebel poet, deeply ingrained in the imaginaries of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions. It also describes the influence of peasant leaders, especially in Chalatenango, a northern department in El Salvador, in the formation of the insurgency. The alliances between urban activists and peasant leaders were largely formed through popular, institutional, and religious pedagogy, that is, rural cooperative training, literacy programs, and workshops on Catholic social doctrine. The introduction considers the roles that Salvadoran intellectuals played in revolutionary politics in the context of the Cold War that prevailed in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

The chapter illustrates the fundamental roles that peasant leaders played in the transformation of the relatively small urban insurgency in the early 1970s into a massive rural insurgency by the end of the decade. It examines the political crisis that fueled the intensification of state terror, militant activism, and insurgency that led to the civil war. The chapter also describes a major realignment that took place within the left and right between 1979 and 1981. It considers the foundation of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) as an historical convergence between the Old and New Left that articulated the grievances and demands of vast urban and rural sectors. A new right-wing coalition made up of businessmen, middle-class activists, military officers, and paramilitaries formed the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), displacing the Party of National Conciliation (PCN), the official party created in 1962, as the main political force of Salvadoran conservatives, and becoming a key player in Salvadoran politics during the civil war and beyond. The chapter analyzes the transformation of the peasant movement into a massive rural insurgency in Chalatenango.